Job Creation and Unemployment for Canadian Women ¹

Abstract

In recent years, Canadian women have been flooding into the labor market, joining the ranks of the employed and unemployed. While the steadily rising participation rate of women has been carefully documented and discussed, the more dramatic increase in the female unemployment rate has been largely ignored or dismissed as unimportant. The growing number of women searching for paid work has been explained, if at all, primarily in terms of changing female aspirations and preferences. The search has been viewed by some as dangerous, as the main cause of the increase in both male and female unemployment. More effort has been directed toward dismissing women’s unemployment as insignificant-- because they do not need the work, because they are secondary workers, and because they claim unemployment primarily to gain eligibility for benefits--than toward investigating the economic conditions which give rise to these massive changes in women’s labor force behavior.

This paper builds on work reported in P. Armstrong (1979) and H. Armstrong (1979). Financial support for this work has come in part from the Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women, to which Pat Armstrong extends her excellent typing during the preparation of this paper. For the sake of convenience, “work” in this paper refers to labor market work. This is not to deny that almost all women work in the home.